Tru Calling/Recap/S1/E05 Haunted/Analysis

The intro scene to this episode is absolutely horrible. It's this mash of non-information, trying to set up some mysterious thing that happened to her at some point in the past. The dialog comes off as so arbitrary and forced that it fails to give the viewer any of the much-needed reason to continue watching. The viewer is supposed to be sucked in by the promise of mystery, but instead is shied away by the promise of boredom. A failure of writing and acting.

The fact that the mysterious incident is exactly what you think it is doesn't help the people who stuck around.

This episode will unfortunately be the standard for most of the next run of episodes. This is what sank the show: it was frontloaded with crap. Not Filler so much as just shabby writing and execution.

At least the last episode had an excuse: it involved 6 new characters. This one only involved 3, and 2 of them were perfectly flat. The success or failure of this episode was on Paige. And Paige failed in every way.

Much of it comes from the actress, as mentioned above. But part of it comes from the setup. We should sympathize with Paige. That's what we're supposed to do. She's supposed to be going on a search for the truth, and Tru is trying to stop that. At the very least, we should see her side of things somewhat.

But the fact that this search involves killing yourself makes siding with her unlikely. The only way her decision can come across as sympathetic is if we actually see her trying alternatives and failing with them. It's one of those cases where the "show, don't tell" precept really needs to be followed. We simply can't buy into her doing something this risky without real knowledge of her alternatives.

The fact that we discover that her death was caused only by her monumental stupidity didn't help matters.

Also, there was the acting in the first death/resuscitation sequence with Steven, the Indian guy. That was horrible from everyone involved. I understand that they believe in this process, but the atmosphere of the scene was almost lighthearted, like Steven was going off to band camp or something. And I know that's supposed to try to fit into the idea that they see this as OK, but the fact that they're not very serious about the whole thing makes them seem either subhuman or just stupid.

There were good things about this episode. They cut out the nonsense with Tru's time jumps; they simply had it happen at a convenient moment, rather than this long drawn-out setup with that silly not-scary music. However, they still had Tru going back to the morgue to verify what happened, which requires a level of stupidity that no human language has ever needed words to describe.

Additional props go to Eliza Dushku and Jeremy's actor; the date was short, but they did their jobs very well. Eliza's expressions as Jeremy revealed himself to be a pretty douchebag were priceless.

Now, something needs to be said about the ending, where Davis reveals that he actually knows what's going on. Obviously, they've been building up to this for a while. The fact that Davis didn't fire Tru on the spot for stealing the morgue's supply of glucogon, as well as their conversation at that time, was a strong indicator that he was somewhat aware of things. The build up to this reveal was very well done. The only bad part is that the payoff happened in a low-quality episode like this one, rather than in a truly good episode like it deserves to.